Dear Mr. Bloomberg, or may I call you Mike?
So, Wednesday didn’t quite go according to plan, did it?
You’ve invested $400 million dollars in the biggest, fastest, shiniest campaign toy that money can buy. You’ve moved from zero to competitive in all the polls. But for far too much of the time on that debate stage, you still wound up looking and sounding like a guy who just fell off the pumpkin truck.
We know, you’re a billionaire, and super smart, to boot. You are accustomed to people telling you that you’re the brightest, richest, funniest and best-looking guy in the room. I get it. But like many billionaires, you have some cognitive blind spots and probably think that your skill in one domain transfers to all others.
You’re missing a few key elements in this fight, so here’s a little pro bono tough love.
First, your prep for the debate was some Dollar Store garbage. It wasn’t your answers on money in politics or buying the election that were problematic. You walked into Elizabeth Warren’s NDA question buzzsaw and got flattened. Those answers were, and I’ll use a technical term here, disastrous. Thankfully, you cleaned that up Friday afternoon, which was smart. In the era of #MeToo, it would be malpractice to be as unprepared as you were for those questions. How much are you paying those consultants again?
Second, you need to kill off Bernie Sanders before you can fight Donald Trump. With all your resources and all your assets, I know it’s tempting to look at this race as an exercise in which you’re just going to numerically game the system and roll it up by winning states where no one else can afford to compete. After all, you’re kind of a quant, a numbers guy.
This isn’t a system that responds only to financial inputs. It’s twitchy, dumb, and weird. It responds more to emotion than logic.
Sanders is racing ahead of the field right now borne on a tidal wave of stupid, short-term thinking on the part of the Democratic electorate. You know — as do most sane people — that Trump is salivating to run against Red Bernie. Unfortunately, the Democratic primary electorate isn’t most people. They live in a land of magical realism where imaginary armies of progressive rural Wisconsin voters can’t wait to march the aristocrats off to the metaphorical guillotine.
In 2016, every Republican in the field played a stupid game regarding Donald Trump. Their mental argument went something like this: “Well, I’ll just wait for Trump to take out Marco” or “I’ll just take a wait for Trump to take out Jeb” or “I’ll just wait for Trump to take out Ted Cruz.” Even though the field was considered chock-full of smart, able candidates, in the end none of them survived because they failed to go after the main enemy right away.
The other players in the field went after you, not Bernie, because they’re afraid of Sanders’ oh-so-Trumplike Bro and bot army. They think attacking him will “depress turnout” or that it will “divide the party” or that they’ll “need his voters later.” Hillary Clinton thought that and didn’t do what needed to be done. She believed to the last he would help her campaign, and he didn’t.
There’s nothing he has in terms of support that you can’t buy, build or substitute with other voters.
Here’s the irony: You’re the only one in the party who can stop him, and you’re the worst possible candidate to do it. Everyone else who was snapping at you on that stage was conscious of the fact that Bernie is the real target, but you were the tempting target.
You need to educate Democratic voters to the hard fact that Sanders will lose to Trump, giving you two bites of the same apple: purging the Democratic Party of its poison while also keeping up your brand image as the Trump slayer.
You also need to communicate that Sanders will cause the Democrats to be unable to recapture the Senate because the states where the Senate race is being played out this year are not woke progressive hotbeds but rather moderate and reddish states. If they understand the stakes, even the wokest Democrats might — slowly — start to get it.
Make the case that with Bernie, the race isn’t a referendum on Trump, but a contest of competing economic systems, one that Americans generally believe in, and one that they fear and hate. Americans like their socialism rebranded and disguised as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, not fiery revolution.
Don’t fall for the bogus logic that attacking Bernie will depress Democratic turnout in the fall. Sanders’ voters aren’t loyal Democrats anyway. They are fanatics, they are cultists, they are the other side of the ideological and political horseshoe from Trumpers. The fact that about 12% of his voters went for Trump in 2016 is a permanent screw-you to the establishment Democratic Party.
Hillary Clinton learned this lesson four years ago: You can’t negotiate with political terrorists. You can’t placate the implacable. Nothing you ever do will make Sanders and his people happy. The only thing you can do is win. There is no progressive uprising in the wings, and Trump motivates your base more powerfully than Bernie’s campaign of Free Stuff and revolutionary babble, but first you have to do the work.
You can get back to hitting Trump soon enough. A quick reality check on Trump’s political fortunes has a balance sheet with a lot of deficits. His polling is still largely upside down — if not outright negative — in many of the swing states both sides need to win this fall.
Heck, Trump’s barely beating even the lowest-polling Democrats in Texas, according to the new Texas Tribune poll. His administration is a rolling sea of corruption stories, with this week’s heavy-handed attempt to save Roger Stone from prison time and the DOJ’s brand-new attempt to save Mike Flynn from the same fate were demonstrations that the rule of law is dead.
As a pro-Iraq-war billionaire who plays lots of footsie with China and has a well-earned reputation as a nanny nag, you’re not a great messenger. But you’re probably the best one Dems have got.
Ask yourself why Donald Trump is working so hard to pick Bernie as his opponent. Trump’s staff recognizes that the imaginary movement exists in Bernie’s head of a proletarian wave of progressive voters throughout the Midwest swing states is an utter illusion. There is no there there. There’s no outcry in the heartland or another in swing states like Florida and Arizona for Medicare for All, or whatever collectivist fantasy motivates Red Depends baby Bernie Sanders.
After South Carolina, you’ll have a very, very brief window to reset the playing field. You have a moment to get Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg on board. There are six cars in the center lane and one in the left. You can do the math.
Burn him down. The fate of your campaign, and the fate of the Democratic presidential campaign in the fall depends on it. You can always either win those voters back or and expand your voter pool in other places and other ways. Worry about that later. Right now, you have one job.
I know this all sounds harsh, and I know this all sounds off the agenda for the campaign your people thought you could run. You cannot shortcut this. You cannot escape your destiny.
The stakes are enormous, and existential.
The Democratic Party as an institution is a shambolic mess. It is broke, incompetent, dangerous to itself and others, and led by people who don’t have the will and the skill to do this job. They’re whistling past the graveyard and pretending this is going to be an easy lift in the fall. This is madness, and must be addressed by competent adults outside of the existing party structure. If not you, who?
Not just for your campaign, but for the Democratic Party and for America.
Wilson is a Republican strategist and author of “Running Against The Devil.”
